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A key concern of
this website is the need for comprehensive reform
of the worldwide money system.

However my current emphasis on it does not imply that I think
the need to shift other aspects of human life in society from
dependency to self-direction and self-control is any less
important than I previously thought. Quite the reverse.

For example, enabling more people all over the world to decide
and control their own work instead of depending
on employers to provide and control it, will be one of many such
interacting shifts in the overall pattern of systems renewal on which
the future of humanity will depend. Connected shifts in spheres
like education and health will be just as necessary. But
virtually none will be possible if the worldwide money system
goes on compelling or encouraging people to reject them.

In other words, comprehensive reform of the worldwide money system is a
core challenge that will help to determine how much longer
human civilisation survives and evolves in anything like its present
form. It is a necessary condition, if not by
itself a sufficient condition, of our survival beyond the end of
this century.

Money and finance now constitute a worldwide system.
As it works today, it results in systemic inefficiency and injustice
in almost every sphere. It imposes a perverse calculus of
values, compelling or encouraging almost everyone in the
world to compete against one another for a greater share of planetary
resources and, in doing so, to turn planetary resources into waste.

In other words, money and finance provide the main scoring system
for the life of society. Changing the scoring system to
get a better game is a priority for people with many different
concerns, not just a special interest in money and finance. Above
all, the 'experts' in charge of money and finance must be stopped
from managing them to serve their own interests.

This means that governments must collaborate urgently
in comprehensive reform of the world's money system. Active
citizens must insist that they do so. And so must non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) concerned with almost every issue of
any importance - social issues (poverty, welfare,
social injustice, health, human rights, etc), environmental
issues (climate change, energy supply and use, water, food
and agriculture, etc); and general public policy and economic
issues (world future prospects; local and community economic
development; ethical investing, trading and consuming; corporate
social responsibility; etc).

My understanding of these things began to crystallise in the 1970s,
though its roots go back further than that. I came to see then, as
others were seeing, that world society was in an early stage
of a 'great transformation' and that, as has happened from
time to time in history - for example, at the Renaissance - this
would affect every aspect of human life.

I saw then that different people would respond in different ways
to it.

Three possible responses were:

Business As Usual;

HyperExpansion (HE), boosting the drives
of the industrial age - centralising, scientific, technical,
economic; and

Sane, Humane, Ecological (SHE), inspired
by a new, genuinely post-industrial direction for
human society's next stage of development. Based on principles
of Enable and Conserve, SHE
would give priority to the needs of people and the
earth.

I recognised that the actual future would be shaped by a mixture
of all these and other responses, or visions, or scenarios. But
I have focused since then on what the third one – the
sane alternative – would mean in practice.

Some people still claim that people who support an alternative
on those lines have no constructive proposals to offer. Such
people are ignorant and wrong.

Over the past thirty years or more, increasing
numbers of people around the world have been exploring
what changes a sane alternative would mean for various
aspects of life -
for work, for health, for economy,
for information and knowledge and education,
for food, for the ways we use energy and technology,
and so on - and how to bring about those changes.

Sustainable Development; People-centred Globalisation;
Combining economic efficiency with economic justice; Progress
that is socially just and environmentally benign; Money and
Finance as
servants not masters. Ideas and concepts like those are not
just pipe-dreams. They are essential practical goals for
the future of our one-world community and the prospect for
its survival.

The conventional idea of progress, with
indiscriminate economic growth, socially and environmentally
damaging globalisation, and remote government decisions closely
linked to the interests of business and finance, is not a possible
way forward.
It's not enough now to say "the future doesn't have to
be like that". It can't be like that. Those who
think it can are leading the world to disaster on a catastrophic
scale.

Some users of the website will
be interested in its more
visionary ideas, others in its more practical topics;
some in the future of work, others in the future of health;
some in the history of ideas, others in action to
change the present state of affairs; and so on and so forth.

I aim to make it as easy as I can for people to find their
way around the website, in accordance with their different interests
and preferences. Click here for tips on how to use it.